Country 20 - Bhutan

Bhutan is a Buddhist country in the eastern Himalayas. It is bordered by India and Tibet and is Asia's second least populated country. It is on the ancient silk route between Asia and Europe.        It's landscape ranges from the sub-tropical plains to sub-alpine Himalayas.                                      There is evidence that the country has been inhabited since 2000BC and it became Buddhist in AD7.  Today the country's economy is based around agriculture, forestry, tourism and selling electricity from its hydroelectric power plants to India. 

Bhutan has a rich and unique cultural history as it was isolated from the rest of the world until the mid 20th century. While Indian people can visit the country for free other tourists have to pay a daily fee which makes the country expensive to visit.

Bhutanese cuisine includes red rice, buckwheat and maise. Meat includes pork, beef, chicken and yak, and stews are popular flavoured with cheese and chillies. Ema Datchi is the traditional dish - it is a soup made from chillies and cheese!   

It has taken some time for us to pluck up the courage to try some food from Bhutan - mainly because soup made from chillies and cheese sounds quite unpleasant! However, we believe that food that has become a national dish - however weird it seems - must be good, so we decided to take the plunge!!!!! 😆

We made Ema Datshi, Pork Fing (because it had a funny name) and Hapai Hoentoe (you need to scroll down the page to find it). There aren't many recipes on the internet but these three seemed interesting!

We decided that we would make 3 courses and went for the Hapai Hoentoe first. They are like little ravioli but the 'pasta' is made from plain flour, buckwheet flour and water.

This is the filling - bok choy, poppy seeds, garlic, ginger, red onion, farmers cheese (we used local feta), chili powder, and Szechuan peppercorns (we couldn't find any of these so we used Shichimi Togarashi spice which contains them). The recipe also needed a lot of butter which needed to be clarified - we used ghee instead.

I used the pasta machine to roll the dough very thin.

I tried to fold the dough to look like the photo but failed miserably as the dough was so soft so I went for ravioli instead!

All ready to be cooked in boiling water.

 

The finished Hapai Hoentoe. We really felt there should be a sauce of some kind - but no recipes mentioned it.

 Gary made the Pork Fing. Onion, tomato, butter, pork, water and CHILLIES all put into water and boiled for and hour and a half. Then cellophane noodles are added.

The chillies and noodles aren't added until the end of the cooking time.

The finished dish.

Now onto the main event! Ema Datshi. Soup made from cheese and chillies - wierd!

The ingredients: lots of chillies, an onion, 2 tomatoes, feta cheese, garlic, and coriander leaves (cilantro). 

We tracked down this HUGE bag of red rice - we only needed a cup! Red rice is eaten with the Ema Datshi.

Our finished Ema Datshi with red rice

We really had low expectations for this dish. It looked a bit like a Thai curry - without the coconut milk - and we had added more cilantro because we had bought a huge bunch and the recipe called for 3 leaves! 

So we dished up a spoonful of red rice and one of soup and then, with some reluctance, dug in.......

The Verdict?

Well, we probably won't be cooking Bhutanese food on a regular basis but it was ok.

The Hapai Hoentoe were a bit bland but tasted alright. The Pork Fing - again not bad - more flavourful than we had expected with some chilli kick!

Now onto the Ema Datshi! 

After an initial small portion we went back for seconds and then thirds and then finished it off! It was quite morish. The cheese hadn't quite melted and gave a lovely salty creamy texture. The chillies weren't too hot and the sauce was tasty. We are sure that the dish would be a lot more fiery in Bhutan but our version was good and we were very pleased that we had finally decided to brave it and give it a go!